It has been worn by A-list musicians, sports stars and artists, timed a World Cup soccer final and appeared on the Olympic podium. Love it or loathe it, there is no denying the impact that Hublot’s Big Bang has had on watchmaking and popular culture since its introduction 20 years ago.
Released in 2005, the original Big Bang design was big and brash. It had an oversize 44-millimeter case; a chronograph, or stopwatch, function; and a bezel held in place with six exposed screws. Also prominent was its experimental material mix of steel or red gold, titanium, ceramic, carbon fiber, Kevlar and rubber. That year, it won the design prize at the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève, the watch industry’s annual awards event.
It also set Hublot, founded in 1980 and generally considered an insider sort of brand up to that point, on the way to becoming something of a household name.
“The Big Bang was a miracle,” said Jean-Claude Biver, the industry veteran who was the company’s chief executive at the time. “When we started in 2004, nobody knew Hublot. Ten, 15 years later, everybody knew the name. It made Hublot.”
The watch’s name helped. “I came up with the name because I was convinced this type of watch, with its materials, dimensions, colors and modular construction would create a revolution in the watchmaking tradition,” said Mr. Biver, 75.
The Big Bang was expensive, too. “The first steel and rubber models were 8,900 Swiss francs,” he said. “It was not cheap at all. It was courageous to come out at that price.”
But its sales significantly changed the brand’s finances. According to Mr. Biver, the company’s 2004 revenues totaled 28 million Swiss francs. By 2008, he continued, the figure was “more than 200 million,” and the brand was acquired by LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the luxury giant that owns the TAG Heuer and Zenith watch companies. Mr. Biver said the deal was worth “close to 450 million Swiss francs.”
The brand’s growth has continued. Although LVMH does not break out brand performance, Morgan Stanley’s annual watch report, based on the company’s research, estimated that the watchmaker’s annual revenues peaked at 744 million Swiss francs in 2022, and totaled 495 million Swiss francs in 2024.
The Big Bang’s influence wasn’t limited to Hublot’s sales. Mr. Biver and Ricardo Guadalupe, who succeeded Mr. Biver as the brand’s chief executive, invested heavily in marketing and sponsorships in areas where few high-end watch brands had ventured before, taking the company and its watch into soccer as the official timekeeper of the World Cup, onto the wrists of the Olympic sprinter Usain Bolt, the French soccer star Kylian Mbappé and the Chinese pianist Lang Lang, as well as into creative collaborations with the American street artist Shepard Fairey and the Swiss tattoo artist Maxime Plescia-Büchi, founder of Sang Bleu.
At the 2022 World Cup, the referee, Szymon Marciniak, wore a connected version of the Big Bang to time the final.
Critics were impressed. “Biver was a can of Easy Start in the carburetor of the watch industry,” said the watch expert James Gurney, referring to a product that helps cars start on cold days.
Mr. Gurney was the editor of the specialist watch magazine QP when the Big Bang was released. “The Big Bang set up Hublot to become one of the most successful brands in the industry,” he said. “From that, the industry picked up a lot in terms of how to do marketing from Hublot’s example.”
The Big Bang wasn’t the first oversize high-end watch, though. In 1993, Audemars Piguet introduced the Royal Oak Offshore, a muscular piece that counted Arnold Schwarzenegger among its fans. The Big Bang was criticized for its similarities to that timepiece — the Offshore’s bezel also was held in place by visible screws, for example.
“It was the hardest part,” said Mr. Biver of those reviews. “It’s never easy to fight against people who believe you look like your brother or sister. But it was also positive, because the more people talk about you, it brings you nevertheless awareness.”
Twenty years in, what’s next for the Big Bang?
The model’s familiarity actually might be its biggest threat, said Julien Tornare, who became Hublot’s chief executive in September after eight months at TAG Heuer.
“It grew so fast and so much that it might have become a little bit too normal,” he said, noting that the 130 models in the Big Bang collection account for about 40 percent of Hublot’s sales today (and there are spinoffs, such as the Spirit of Big Bang collection). “And if Hublot normalizes, it’s losing impact, it’s losing power, and I think that would be wrong. Hublot has to keep on being very different and disruptive from the other brands.”
In the United States, the Big Bang collection’s prices now range from $11,300 for a Steel Diamonds 38mm to $550,000 for an Integrated Tourbillon Full Blue Sapphire 43mm.
Mr. Tornare said he was planning new retail concepts and marketing campaigns, using as inspiration a provocative 2010 advertisement that featured a bruised Bernie Ecclestone, then-chief executive of Formula 1 racing, after he was mugged and the attackers stole his Big Bang. Its headline, a quote from Mr. Ecclestone: “See what people will do for a Hublot.”
Mr. Tornare said the Big Bang’s introduction shook up an industry that was becoming stale. “It was a wake-up call for an industry that tended to be too heritage-driven,” he said.
The same is true today, he noted: “We cannot only look at the past and do revivals, we have to create the watchmaking of the future.”
